A blog about hacking, but really more in a golfish sense.

About this

Hello.

This blog began life as a chronicle of my life inside a touring band with a music/business idea. The
early days were me writing about letting go of an old dream so that I could have a new one.
Then it sort of turned into an autobiography
of the last 8 or so years of my life - moving from the music business into the tech
business, fatherhood, life and all that.

For the last 8 years I've worked with, thought about, and written about a variety of web
technologies - Drupal, Rails,
Linux, AWS.
My LinkedIn resume is here. I still think and
occasionally write about the music business and other personal things but lately I'm using this
as a scratch pad to write about my new gig.

So welcome and please have a look around.

- Grubb, November 2016

Recent Posts

I just switched this blog over to a Silex application for a few weeks, but I never got around to adding in the functionality to add new tickets, and add new tags, and link the two together, and all that other stuff that a framework like Laravel just gives you.

Problemspace

You've got a new site on Platform.sh that is basically at the end of its development stage, and you're preparing to go live. You've decided on Cloudflare to host your DNS. Cloudflare is a good choice for smaller sites, and I recommend it often. Is has a few things going for it -

It has a free tier, which gives you pretty much everything you really need for a personal or small business site.

I was just remembering this post from back in the early days of this blog. Social media was being used to shine a bright light on oppression and old, repressive regimes were falling.

Fast forward to now, the end of 2016. Social media is being used to organize vastly more repressive regimes, and the ease with which anyone can now spread convincing lies makes it almost impossible to tell what's true anymore.

Problemspace

You have a decent sized project and your deployments are taking a while. Platform.sh rebuilds your entire application from scratch with each git push so in some cases the process of downloading all those 3rd party packages can take quite a while. We can and do manage local caches of some composer packages due to our PHP heritage, which helps to make composer install a pretty snappy affair, but it's simply not possible to effectively do this with Nodejs.

Easy Markdown with Syntax Highlighting, PHP Edition

Hi there, and welcome back to this 14th installment of "I rewrote my blog in another framework that I'm interested in learning, this time in Laravel". The trick that we'll be exploring today is that, in contrast to Python (the last version was in Django), PHP's lib story is a bit more sparse for this exact use case. However, I'm completely pleased with the outcome, so let's get busy!